This year we have revamped our seed house at Burncoose to allow us more space to grow, we now have a large amount of bench space for seed trays and a deep soil bench for larger seeds such as magnolias. Our team has been keeping a close eye on the ripening of a variety of species and we hope to showcase a few of them on here.
To start we have these fabulous Magnolia Sargentiana Robusta seeds which produce one of the most interesting seed pods. In October they start to show signs of ripening by looking like crocodile eyes and popping open. The seed inside should be jet black once out of its protective casing.
A brief description of what you need to do propagate magnolia seeds is bellow:
- Wait until your seed pod is ripe enough to pick. (You’ll be able to see the bright orange cases)
- Pop out all of the orange seed cases from the seed pod, here at Burncoose to save out thumbs we leave them in a plastic bag for a few weeks for them to soften slightly. The case is very hard to break into without doing this. You’ll also find that towards the end of there ripening season they’ll start dropping on the floor, so make sure to be vigilant so the animals don’t get to them first.
- You’ll now need to the seed out of its orange casing. That casing includes chemicals which would inhibit the germination of the seed, so this process is really important for the seeds viability. To do this, we nick the casing slightly and soak in warm water over night, changing the water every few hours. This allows them to soften up and be easily popped out of the casing. Pop them out and wash them off and they’re ready for the next step. - You should now have a lot of black seeds which are ready to store for the winter. You may find it helpful at this step to edit through your seeds and pick out any that are not thick/big enough. - We pop ours in some damp potting material and store in the fridge at a temperature between 1-5C for roughly three months. - Then in the spring we’ll sow them and wait for germination.
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